Shaman’s Seeing Replicated in Lab

EXCLUSIVE REPORT A. Prentiss Mann..

PITTSBURGH, PA -Forty years ago, tales of sorcery from iconic author and anthropologist Dr. Carlos Castaneda (1925-1998) enthralled a generation. Today, a local firm says it has validated “without question” the author’s reports of shamanic seeing in a laboratory setting.

“Our finding is as extraordinary as it was unforeseen,” said Dustin Mercer, CEO of TruTester LLC, the company responsible for the claim. “It has taken us three years to begin to understand the results from our original experiment,” he continued. “Without realizing it, we applied a great number of what Castaneda called not-doings in our test. This led to the subject entering a unique state of awareness, which after investigation we determined was the legendary seeing as described in Castaneda’s numerous volumes on Mesoamerican sorcery. And we achieved it without the use of psychoactive substances, I might add.” Mercer said.

What is Seeing?

“Normally, the mind’s perception of reality operates unchallenged and uninterrupted. What we did was stumble onto a new way of stopping the internal dialogue by pitting the conscious mind’s description of reality versus the conflicting description of its ‘older brother,’ the subconscious mind,” Mercer said. “Castaneda asserted that the only way to see was to pit one description of the world against another,” he continued. “Unwittingly, this is precisely what we accomplished. When this primary interpretation stops, a never-used secondary awareness we all possess takes over. Something known as the energy body.”

Carlos Castaneda

Mercer continued with another startling observation. “Lucid dreaming is now accepted as a fairly well-known ability we all have. What the lucid dreamer does is transform the ever-changing dream world into a static reality. Conversely, when someone engages in seeing, our hard static reality transmutes into a dreamlike experience. And the seer instantly realizes where the legendary powers of the sorcerers come from,” he said. “You are left shaking in your boots with the sudden understanding that all human beings possess a magical side that is as terrifying as it is irresistibly compelling.”

Near Death Experience

““After less than ten minutes into his first A.S.K. (applied self kinesiology) procedure, our subject experienced a near death experience. He didn’t think he was dying, He knew he was,” Mercer said, smiling. “Again, this is consistent with Castaneda. While seeing, the luminous fibers that hold us together expand, just as they do in dying.” He continued, “Next the subject experienced what he could only describe as eternity. Interestingly, he said eternity wasn’t how he imagined it. Rather than being a really, really long time,” Mercer smiled, “his empirical experience was instead the impossible, an utter void of time.”

The Investigation

According to the company president what happened next sent them on a three-year search for answers. “Along with what the subject described as ‘instant omniscience’ or what Castaneda called silent knowledge, was his disquieting report of hearing what is known as the voice of seeing.”

Mercer affirmed that the subject was in perfect mental health and his hearing a voice was not the result of any pathology. “On the contrary, the voice of seeing spoke what our subject says was a sober uncontestable truth for his subconscious mind, yet an utter impossibility for his conscious mind to grasp or accept. It said, You pretend not to know the answers to all the questions in your life.” Mercer laughed and yelled, “Pretend!?!? The conscious mind says, ‘I am not pretending!! Trust me, I do not know!’ While at the same time your subconscious realizes, ‘Oh my god. Wow, I really am pretending. I know everything. This is bizarre.’”

Coincidentally, Mercer was a personal student of Dr. Castaneda’s for five years, and prior to this a longtime aficionado of the anthropologist’s work. “I suddenly remembered that the validating criterion of seeing is hearing that voice, which other subjects have described as also being like a very strong thought,” he said.

Other subjects? “Yes, our results have been repeated,” Mercer said, “outside the lab. A TruTester user contacted me shortly after our test saying she had the most astonishing experience and couldn’t wait to share her ‘new use for TruTester.’ Turns out she too heard the voice of seeing utter a similar paradoxical aphorism. “To her it said, (R…,) fear is not fact.”

TruTester is Mercer’s invention, a personal kinesiology tool that operates as a muscle tester or dynamometer. To operate, users squeeze the unit together in a series of two sequences in which they test their body’s reaction to two opposing statements on the same topic. E.g. a user will say, “My name is Clara,” and then squeeze the unit with maximum force. Next she will say, “My name is Santa Claus,” and squeeze again. TruTester will show that the user is stronger when she makes the truthful statement.

“Strength is the body’s way of saying yes, I am in agreement with this statement or thought field,” Mercer said. Applied kinesiology (AK) practitioners hold that the body cannot lie to itself and use AK as a means to tap into the body’s and/or subconscious mind’s innate wisdom on any host of subject matter otherwise unavailable consciously. AK’s founder, Dr. George Goodheart was named by TIME magazine in 2001 as one of the top 100 innovators in medicine.

Truth in Contradiction

“Interestingly, the voice of seeing always reveals both irrefutable yet contradictory fact and fiction to the seer,” Mercer said. “Of course, the fiction, to the conscious mind’s great surprise, is always true.”

Mercer leaned back and explained. “In the woman’s case she was investigating her panic attacks. For her conscious mind, her fear was fact. People experiencing panic attacks don’t wistfully conjecture that the plane might crash. They know it is. Who wouldn’t be terrified? But when the voice of seeing told her that fear is not fact she was seeing two different brains at work, you might say. Two different points of view. It wasn’t as though she were reading this statement on a blackboard. It was coming from her own subconscious as an already established truth: fear is not fact; which was now face to face with another long-established truth from her conscious mind, fear is fact. When the voice of seeing speaks, every word is validated with uncontestable authority while also being an outlandish neologism to the conscious mind.

“Post-seeing the conscious mind is then forced to revamp its original long held rules about the world. Its subjective interpretations or descriptions of reality are no match for the objective truths asserted by our ancient timeless selves. When it comes from within it packs a wallop. You are left dazed for days, weeks even years as the mind struggles to reorganize itself under these bizarre yet unimpeachable new rules of reality. It doesn’t like to change its own mind, apparently,” Mercer laughed. “And greatly resents this intrusion by its wiser, distant cousin. In a matter of seconds the subconscious mind’s unshakable truths summarily quash the conscious mind’s tenuous and subjective opinions. It’s as devastating as it is enlightening,” he said.

Sorcery is Real?

Mercer chooses his words carefully when asked whether their shamanic discovery has magical or supernatural origins.

“Truth is, we are magical! When you see you return to an awareness that you remember as being infinitely more familiar and more normal to you than ‘this’ one. That so-called magic is our natural biological heritage. Afterwards, your first thought is, How did I ever forget this? Even more upsetting, you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that something has been aggressively and purposely trying to keep you from perceiving with this other awareness,” he said. After a pause he murmured quietly, “This sentiment was iterated repeatedly by Dr. Castaneda. He called it the topic of topics.”

You can see signs in any major city advertising the services of seers and psychics. Is this discovery of seeing really so earth-shattering?

“Seeing is not a sudden hunch or psychic insight or ESP – any of that,” he said. “It is an event. A catastrophic event,” he emphasized. “A true awakening. As this world crumbles, another takes its place. A world that is now perceived by what Castaneda called the energy body. When you experience the world as perceived by the energy body you suddenly validate another truth he presented; that there are two of us. And you are also left with the unmistakable certainty that this world is a description, a projection, or as our subject said, ‘a very poor approximation’ of the real thing,” Mercer said. He leaned back in his leather office chair as he closed his eyes and hummed softly. “There is one more thing you become aware of,” he whispered. “Something Carlos confided in me fifteen years ago.”

The CEO quickly changed topics and became animated. “Dr. Castaneda said there are two of us. our physical bodies and our energy bodies; or to western man, our conscious minds and our subconscious minds or autonomic nervous system. This so-called other mind does indeed know everything. It has to!” he laughed. “It performs several billion functions every second without our conscious intervention. Lord knows what would happen if we had to remind ourselves to breathe every second,” he joked.

Mercer elaborated on a thought-provoking point. “The conscious mind has made us forget a very disturbing paradox: that we incorporate both omniscient teacher and bumbling student in one being.” He continued, “At night our subconscious minds create allegorical dream imagery with a sophistication and genius beyond anything we could ever replicate during the day. And as over a hundred years of psychoanalytic research will attest, dreams are designed to teach, resolve conflict and process trauma. Yet when we wake in the morning and try to comprehend the meaning of the flying horse in the living room we are stumped, unless we apply a focused effort to its deeper meaning.

“Therefore, one can say without question that every one of us embodies an impossible paradox, or one impossible for the authoritarian mind to admit: we are both teacher and student. We are built as a self-contained, complete unit, one designed to learn from itself.” He added, “Although the self one learns from is not a self, per se. It’s the infinite. The other side of our bubble of awareness, where we never dare tread foot,” Mercer said. “Unless, of course, you’re a little crazy like me.”

Indeed, and since seeing was described in Castaneda’s work as the penultimate experience that occurs only after a lifelong arduous struggle of following the warrior’s way, achieving the same results in ten minutes with a plastic tube seems a little far-fetched.

“A little?!” Mercer doubled over in a belly laugh. “Yes it’s baffling. What the hell just happened here!?! we wondered. Was it a deep theta state as described in Beyond Feedback by Elmer Green? But we know now it was the not-doings I mentioned earlier. So subtle that when I tell them to you your mind will say, meh… he is full of shit!” he laughed. “And in this way the mind will prevent you from discovering your other side, where the treasure lays hidden.”

The Not-Doings

After promising we’d be polite and keep an open mind, Mercer continued. “First of all,” he said as he rubbed his hands together, “if you wanted to have a conversation with yourself, how would you do it?” he asked. “Unh? Of course, the mind has us believe that we have a conversation with ourselves all the time. Hell, we often wish we could turn off the conversation and get some peace and quiet.

“Fact is, we are the helpless receivers of the mind’s never-ending monologue – not a dialogue,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “There is no give and take, no back and forth exchange of ideas.” He leaned forward and grinning broadly he said, “But in the A.S.K. procedure TruTester lets you see what your conscious mind thinks, such as when it says ‘I cannot quit smoking,’ then what your subconscious mind thinks, “Yes, I can quit smoking,” and then the coup de grace comes when you become a third party observer of both of these opposing points of view. And as you hold these two conflicting ideas in focus another you emerges, the one watching them both for the first time. It seems to materialize out of thin air. And then you see.”

And the not-doing is? “The not-doing is putting your mind on the witness stand for the first time in its life and challenging its never-before disputed views of reality. The not-doing is having for the first time ever a real conversation with it as a separate, distinct functioning entity. You call it on the carpet. Why are you saying I cannot quit smoking when my subconscious says I can. Hunh?” Mercer stretches his legs and sighs. “It really hates that!” he chuckles. “And then it bellows with all its fearful might, Who is it that dares to challenge the king! The not-doing is presenting for the first time ever a worthy and superior opponent against the mind’s totalitarian rule.” Mercer said the fight is real, that the shamanic term of warrior is apropos and not a colorful metaphor.

Mercer went on to reveal that he’s discovered another powerful not-doing in recent popular literature. In particular, he cites in the work Zero Limits by author Joe Vitale of The Secret fame. “As I read about the Hawaiian system of cleaning and clearing, ho’oponopono, as described by Dr. Hew Len, I saw that while neither the author nor the practitioners may have realized it, they touched on knowledge long held secret by the ancient shamans.”

Mercer said he needed a break before we broached this subject and made some coffee. While sipping some extra-strength joe, “I am not an impeccable warrior,” he joked and continued his point. “With ho’oponopono you take credit, or rather take responsibility for everything in your reality. So the neighbor who blocks your driveway every morning is not the one at fault. You are!” he says. “Similar to if you were describing a dream to your therapist about a screaming chimpanzee, you wouldn’t say, ‘Well, that chimpanzee was from someone else’s dream, it wasn’t about me,’ you have to admit that, yes, the screaming chimp, the guy in the driveway is my creation,” he said. “In the ho’oponopono process you take responsibility for all the elements of your reality or your dream, so to speak. And you change those elements by clearing them, cleaning them, reducing them to zero.”

His eyes lit up. “And this makes the mind is furious! A good thing, by the way. You have pulled back the curtain to reveal that you are the wizard making the screaming chimp. And so you cannot yell at the thoughtless neighbor. You cannot sit and stew and plot your revenge every minute of the day, something the mind loves to do. You humbly take responsibility for the elements in your dream. Everything,” he said.

And the secret knowledge revealed in the ho’oponopono process?

Mercer stood up and looked out the window at the midday traffic below his balcony. He turned and slowly said, “We are intending at such a deep level of awareness that we can sit back and observe reality as if it were a separate thing, like watching a movie, while peacefully oblivious to the fact that just like dreaming at night we are actually creating each and every scene, each and every character.” He turned and resumed his gaze outside. “We are in a dream. And dreaming so deeply we have no clue we are asleep. I call it I AMnesia.”

We Are Dreaming Awake?

Mercer returned to his chair continued with another insight. “When you are asleep, do you have even the slightest idea you are asleep?” he asked. “That’s exactly what’s going on while we are awake. We have no idea we are asleep! As I said before, just as the lucid dreamer becomes ‘awake’ in her sleep, so does the seer suddenly awake into dreaming in this reality. And just like the first time the lucid dreamer wakes up in her dream, seeing is a teeth-rattling jolt. I would say even more so than the lucid dreamer’s awakening because the dreamer is in a realm where phantasmagorical weirdness is already commonplace. Whereas the seer is in hard cold reality, a bone and tissue body, both of which suddenly take on all the properties we have in dreams. You can fly. Walk through walls. Even disappear, if you want.”

He went on to intimate that the ancient sorcerers had a different way of changing their reality, as opposed to the ho’oponopono process.

“As a lucid dreamer, when you want to change your dream, you intend it.” He stopped and collected his thoughts. “When you see, an interesting thing happens. Cause and effect merge into one inextricable unit. You see both happening at the same time, a sort of explosion of energy into matter.

“What sorcerers do is intend to the point where they feel their mind start to crumble in fear as they enter the realm of ‘already happened.’ Where cause and effect are one. Shamans do not use the mind to intensify the idea of the neighbor not parking you in. Instead, they release the mind and its idea of ‘If I imagine this cause really hard this effect will happen,’ of exerting one’s will against reality. They bypass the idea of thoughts and feelings creating our reality and instead leap to where the situation has already occurred. Where reality is created by the dream body, or the energy body.

“Interestingly, powerful thoughts and feelings do come to you after you intend, and you realize why it’s assumed that the feelings should come first. You feel this uncontainable emotional exhilaration as you wait in anticipation for your intention to appear. You know it’s coming! And you see images in your mind almost physically tugging at you, like a little kid in the haunted house, antsy with excitement as his heart pounds and images flood his imagination as he waits for the secret door to open. But these come after the original magical act of intending.”

Mercer sipped his coffee loudly. “Intent is nothing more than the simultaneous merging of cause and effect. So, you could say that the mother of all not-doings is to treat this world as the dream it is, which is essentially what the ho’oponopono process prescribes.”

Seeing Described?

“By definition, because the thing that describes our world, the mind, is turned off while seeing; seeing cannot be described in any conventional way. And this is maddening, I might add. You want to share with the world what you just experienced and compare notes. Then you suddenly realize no one would have a clue what you’re talking about!”

When pressured for an example Mercer replied, “Our subject said that in roughly ten seconds he knew and understood every religious text that has ever been written. And he also saw how they have been misinterpreted,” Mercer said. “Another point, and while this may sound non-scientific, our subject reported something Castaneda called the wave of affection. An indescribable feeling. One is tempted to call it many things. But a wave of affection, of love, that comes from the depths of the universe is pretty accurate. You sense that this love, this wave, is an independent force of some kind.”

And what would be some of those religious misinterpretations?

“What our subject suddenly realized was that throughout history there have been other seers. And he saw that when these seers accidentally fell into seeing, just as he did, upon hearing the voice of seeing they would have been forced to misinterpret it as the voice of god. This is precisely how it comes across: An unimpeachable omniscient source speaks to you while you are engulfed in a wave of omnipotence. A state that appears to simultaneously come from outside of you as well as within you. Hence, the notion that god is both external and internal. But what you are really experiencing is the energy body. It is the creator in a realm beyond space and time.”

Shamans do not believe in a separate external god but rather in the energy body?

“Shamans see that nothing is separate from anything,” Mercer said. “In the same way that you cannot slice heat or light, in the conventional sense anyway, energy is not separable. Imagine if you could see the microwaves of energy that permeate everything on this planet now, from satellite transmissions to radio, TV and the like. You would see them going through and merging into everything. It is the same when you see energy. It is separate while also merged within everything.”

Is the Subconscious the Energy Body?

“That is way too good a question!” he laughed and sighed. “I can only answer in the following way. I wondered the exact same thing myself. And here’s the insight that suddenly came to me one day as I was reading about hypnosis and the subconscious in Your Magic Power To Be Rich by Napoleon Hill. No, wait! It was The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy. Sorry. I read a lot. Murphy would say how the subconscious can know things that you consciously have no way of knowing. These same ideas I came across again in Dr. David Hawkins Power Versus Force and in Dr. John Diamond’s Your Body Doesn’t Lie. And like everyone else I wondered, how could I know something I have never experienced? For instance, how could I know the exact day, month and year of a complete stranger’s birth date, as we have done with TruTester? I’m sorry, but if it has not passed through my ears or eyes there is no way for some part of my brain, no matter where it is, to know this!”

Drum roll, and the answer is…?

“The answer is the energy body. I would say that energy body and the so-called subconscious mind are on the same wave-length, so to speak. They both process energy in an unbiased form, at its irreducible core. Without the imposition of reason’s logic filter of cause and effect. So they can communicate effortlessly.

Can All This Help Humanity?

“When you see, you perceive the human body as a conglomeration of energy fields. A glowing bubble of awareness that you intuit as being sent out on a mission to explore and perceive and grow itself. And you realize that what it grows is awareness. And this awareness grows only by virtue of something almost diabolical: Our physical awareness is commanded to forget its energetic eternal side; but only so that it can then remember it all over again! This remembering the other side is our only true learning. Our only true purpose. We are put deeply asleep for the purposes of re-awakening. That’s it. And this reawakening occurs only when we sneak between the conscious self and the dreaming self and become a third, non-self. What I have been calling seeing. When you see you are simultaneously both awake and asleep, you ignite from within and can actually feel yourself growing a new awareness. It feels like an electric shock of a million volts,” he said.

“With this new awareness you realize that all the agony and pain of being kept in your cell all these years were simply clues to force you to remember that there is something above you. An open window into eternity. And as you float up to the window with your new awareness and the breeze pushes you outside into freedom, you look down at your fellow human beings. And what you see are leaden balloons empty of the helium that should be sending them aloft with awareness. Instead they roll on the floor complaining in the dark shadows, while the window to freedom is just above their heads. You understand why sages proclaim that this is a fallen world. You literally see your fellow man fallen, chained to the ground,” he said.

Can Something be Done?

“You realize that there is virtually nothing you can do to help your fellow man. That the struggle is within each and every one of us; to reclaim our awareness of the energy body.” Mercer became quiet. “That’s why the TruTester discovery is so…extraordinary. For the first time, now anyone can achieve this third point of view. They can see what their conscious minds think versus what their subconscious minds think, and then become that third self, the free balloon, and ignite and merge with that long sought after, elusive energy body.”

Mercer went on to say how Castaneda would hammer into his students how they were perfectly equipped to handle all life’s strife and troubles. That even our altruistic interest in helping our fellow man was an egocentric concatenation of the mind. “The mind would have us believe we are lost, powerless and sinful,” he said. “That we need ‘help.’ What a hideous prick! Truth is, the conscious mind’s mantra of ‘poor baby me’ is an insidious mental program we blindly embrace thanks to the alluring appeal of victimhood. It’s an unspoken emotion we all share, that is, until we see,” Mercer said.

“Truth is, we really do pretend not to know the answers to all our problems. But it seems the mind’s chief job is to uphold this self-defeating pretense. We just don’t want to admit it. And as a result we lose by default.” Mercer drummed his fingers on his desk. “Perhaps the most disturbing and revelatory part of the seeing experience is realizing how blazingly complete and perfect and competent we already are,” he said. “That the mind is lying to us with a vengeance. That it’s essentially programmed to make us lose.”

Lose? But we don’t want to lose. If there are two of us perhaps there is a way to tell the difference between our lying minds and our true minds?

Mercer smiled and said, “I once asked Carlos the very same thing. His response was that our true minds say ‘them, there, it,’ while our egocentric daily mind says, ‘ME, my, mine.’ The conscious mind is a reflective projection of self, while the subconscious looks outside unfettered, like a Hubble telescope focused on infinity, oblivious to any idea of self.

“What was most distressing for our subject was the sudden realization of a very disturbing truth. Something that still has him rattled.” Mercer paused for dramatic effect, then leaned closer and said quietly, “The mind’s only job is to obfuscate all knowledge of the energy body,” he said. “I repeat, it’s only job. You, for instance, I’m sure are convinced right now that I’m speaking of a colorful yet entirely oblique thing; the energy body.” He was right. “But when you experience it you realize the infinite magical treasures the mind has kept from you. And it is absolutely devastating. You are being betrayed by your own mind.” He paused. “But that is another topic for another time,” he mumbled softly.

Mercer remained quiet and then added, “When you reach an irresolvable contradiction you are at the brink of seeing. This is when you take your leap and sneak between the two conflicting perceptions. A paradox such as, we do not need any help, yet there are infinities for us to learn.”

He stared at the ceiling lost in thought when his eyes suddenly lit up. “Something just came to me,” he said, smiling. “The mind talks. The other speaks.”